Arch isnt that hard to use, just more maintenance, you have to update often and you can break things easier. It is defiantly harder to install. Thats why I recommend Garuda as it has a nice gui installer. It comes fully riced too. KDE dragonized is what i went with. The non gaming edition.

You will have to maintain your new system with fresh updates very regularly. You will have to get used to going through .pacnew files. Luckily there are easy ways to do this using meld to view pacnew files side by side with their corresponding config file that helps you migrate data easily.

Being an arch based distro your on the bleeding edge of linux and this means sometimes you will get cut! But an update will come along fairly quickly to heal those wounds. For instance the screen rotation broke a few months back. Easy fix in udev config though.

Debian based distros are pretty bullet proof, takes a but more to fuck one up. You’ll have to wait a lot longer for the things arch users get every day.

Personally i don’t find garuda to be that hard to maintain but Im used to arch already so I know what to expect and more of how to fix things. One of the best things about garuda is it uses brtfs by default and sets up snapper for you so when things go wrong you have an easier time fixing things.

You can always try it out and if it’s not for you you can move on to the next distro. And hop until you find what your looking for.

Best of luck!

So I installed Fedora on my surface. It was a huge pain in the ass. Then I went the with easy arch install of Garuda and everything has been pretty painless. I’m not really suggesting you follow suit as arch distros do require a bit of maintenance others don’t. But you can research garuda and see if it’s a fit for your needs and see if the maintenance is worth it. One benefit of the arch install is almost everything worked right out of the box. Didn’t even need a usb heyboard for installation. Full disk encryption was easy to use because the keyboard just works. That wasn’t the case in fedora, i has installed with full disk encryption and would have to pull out the USB keyboard every boot just to unlock and boot then I could plug the surface keyboard back in to use. Just a heads up if you are wanting to use full disk encryption. You can also set up the encryption to unlock via USB and while not that hard to setup that might be more work than you want to be doing.

Whatever distro you pick you should install the linux-surface kernel and drivers for the stylus. They can be found here, along with specific instructions.

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

They let Feinstein legislate with full blown dementia. As long as they can do what the lobbyists paid them to, these kinds of people likely aren’t going anywhere. It costs a bit of money to own a representative and their owners want as much ROI as possible.

My mobile client has a tagging function to tag users so I favor tagging and downvoting whenever I see stupid. That way others have a heads up. Blocking defiantly is better for most.

Hands down the most advanced and secure smartphone os is grapheneOS.

https://grapheneos.org/

It only runs on pixel devices. App sandboxing, buffer overflow protection, separate users, optional sandboxed google play if you need it for banking apps, automatic reboot after a set time to re encrypt your filesystem, assigning permissions for app access to folders and the list goes on and on.